Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Country Diary
Is rough shooting a dying art? It seems that Guns these days prefer a more sanitised driven day out, rather than getting dirty in the woods
The days of proper rough shooting appear to be over, and it’s a shame. Guns these days seem to prefer driven shooting where you are presented with birds that are either so high that the first few birds over the line are ignored in mistake for starlings, or by clouds of low partridges that flock out of a game crop in an otherwise featureless landscape and bumble over the line, some birds so exhausted, or inexperienced, that they hurry down the field border below hedge height.
The Guns don’t seem to mind, they bang away regardless. At the end of the drive someone will say: “Gosh, that was good fun!” Well, no, it wasn’t.
A good day is getting up early with a thick head and going into a dining room, where you eat a huge breakfast in complete silence. A cursory glance out of the window gives you your timings. Pickup trucks arrive and keepers stand around chatting quietly. This is the time that you should take your equipment out of the gunroom and put it into your car with your dogs. Your car can go anywhere: up hills, along marshes, through rivers and, heavens forbid, on a normal road. It has all your equipment in it: cartridges, sticks, gamebags, waterproofs and basic supplies such as water, beer and good sherry. It also has windows through which you can see, unlike the dreaded game cart.
On reaching the first manoeuvre, the host, an old friend, gives orders, which should be quite detailed on how the operation should proceed. You leave gun slips and cartridge bags in the car. Only complete greenhorns carry cartridge bags when they are walking-up. You should have enough cartridges, in belts and pockets, that you don’t run out during the manoeuvre. It is really rude to run out of ammo.
Into the thick of things
Two or three Guns walk with keepers and a pack of dogs. The standing Guns (two or three at the most) drive off, taking all the cars and having a lovely time looking at the country and chatting happily with their friends, while the walking Guns line up and get into the thick of things. There’s everything in there. Pheasants coming back over the tops of the trees, teal whirling about, woodcock flicking this way and that, pigeons feeding on berries clattering around. The keepers’ gamebags fill up. The walking Guns must keep a good line, so quiet orders of “keep up on the right” or “hold up on the left” are passed along the line.
The Guns ahead, only on a front of 60m or so, start hearing shots in the distance and begin seeing roe deer or muntjac coming by, or a fox perhaps. Woodcock twist through, and packs of high teal whirl and dive. In the Pennines, blackcock and grey hen come powering over, maybe a grey partridge covey, too. In shooting like this there is no prior warning, so the Guns have to be on full alert.
As the lines close, all the game that has crept forward, trapped between the lines, starts to flush. Things pick up and shooting forward becomes more hazardous. The air is full of the sound of cock pheasants clamouring as they rise from reed beds, bursting through the treetops. The constant barrage of fire dying as the two lines merge.
Picking up is then on, and it’s not picking up birds on a bare field. It’s dogs working through thick cover, water, reed beds, dense bramble thicket, blood on their ears from thorn and reed cuts and joy in their eyes. And the gamebags keep filling up.
And then back to the cars to get to the next manoeuvre. “That was good, wasn’t it!”
Willie Athill has lived on the North Norfolk coast all his life. He now farms oyster and seaweed beds.